Sunday, July 10, 2016

Ask PZM: July 2016 - Free eBook Promotions

Q: Any recommendations for getting out the word about a free ebook promotion without spending a lot on advertising?

In June I ran a 5-day KDP Select free promotion for my Navy thriller LT. COMMANDER MOLLIE SANDERS (written with my husband Mitchell R. Miller). I decided not to spend a lot of time and money on the promotion and just see what happened.

Google Plus:

I discovered that on Google Plus I was a member of communities on which I could post information about the free promotion.

Why did I not remember this?

Here is the tricky part. Whenever I go to Google Plus to post an update, my account opens in my feed, where I post the update. I rarely go to my Google Plus profile. But I needed to go to the profile to check something, and lo and behold, scrolling down the page (on the right-hand side) I found I belonged to a few communities. And checking these out, I learned I could post my free ebook promotion to some of them.

Here are the three on which I posted and there are surely more that would be appropriate:

Now will this result in any additional downloads? I have no idea. But it is worth keeping in mind.

Note: Yes, there are tons of Facebook groups on which you can post your free ebook promotion, and I assume many of you know about these groups. I wrote here about the Google Plus communities because I suspect that fewer people know about these posting opportunities.

Goodreads:

I wanted to be able to post an update on Goodreads about the free ebook promotion as I had posted such an update on membership sites such as Stage32.com (screenwriting site — see my profile at www.stage32.com/pzmiller)

Yet I couldn't find a place to post an update on Goodreads because an ebook promotion clearly didn't fit into the "Ask the Author" section.

Then I realized that, although my author blog posts automatically feed into my Goodreads author account, there is the option to add a post right on the account.

I found this option on my Goodreads Author Dashboard under “Your Blog” — scroll down to “Write a New Post.” This new post then appeared at the top of the automatic blog post feed from my author blog.

Note: I could have written this post on my blog and had the post automatically feed into Goodreads. But I didnâ€™t want to write the post on my blog for various reasons, so being able to just write the post on Goodreads was very handy.

P.S. And I pinned the LT. COMMANDER MOLLIE SANDERS book cover from the Amazon Kindle page onto one of my Pinterest boards with the announcement of the free promotion.

Q: Have you tried the Amazon Giveaway program for any of your books or ebooks?

Yes, I have tried the program, choosing to give away ebooks rather than books so that I did not incur shipping costs.

I made a huge error the first time I tried this program: I gave away an ebook to everyone up to my designated number of giveaway ebooks (what Amazon Giveaway calls “First-come, First-served”). This meant the promotion ended almost immediately. I should have done what Amazon Giveaway calls “Lucky Number” (every X entrant wins).

Now, if I were doing a private Amazon Giveaway &dmash; privately sending the URL link only to people whom I wanted to redeem the giveaway — the “First-come, First-served” method would make sense. But this isnâ€™t the right choice for a giveaway whose purpose is to publicly share the giveaway URL in order to get publicity exposure for a book or an ebook. This should be a “Lucky Number” Amazon Giveaway.

FYI — You can use an Amazon Giveaway for almost any product sold on Amazon, not necessarily your own books or ebooks. But obviously for us authors it makes sense to give away our own books. And as we have to buy the ebooks or books via Amazon for the giveaway, we do make back part of the expenditure, depending on our royalty percentage on a particular book or ebook.

How's it goin', eh? Once again, loads of informative stuff from Phyllis. As I've stated many a time, although the info is gobbelty goop to me, I know that the stuff Phyllis mentions can be great for established and aspiring writers.

I hadn't thought about Google communities before, and I think I belong to a few. Plus I hadn't realized I could write a post just for GR. Thanks for the tips! I can't imagine buying my own books from Amazon. They make enough money as it is. LOL!

Great information as usual. I have a question that I can't seem to find the answer to. Every once in a while a I receive an email from a goodread's author. In that email they have a book description, a cover with the Want to Read link below and buylinks at the bottom. How can I do that?

I recently stumbled across that Amazon giveaway thing, when a friend shared a giveaway link...and they signed me up for 3 newsletters because I entered the giveaway. With no disclaimer. Ugh. BUT, it made me excited to try it myself.

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I am Métis from Canada. I began my first novel in 1983 to honour my dad's memory. Today my husband and I live in the home we built with our own hands on Cluculz Lake. My first novel Dead Witness was a finalist in the 2012 Global eBook Awards. Suspense thriller Broken But Not Dead won the 2012 IPPY Silver Medal for Canada West. Mâtowak: Woman Who Cries was released November 1, 2016. Maski was released April 18, 2017. The audiobook version of Matowak is set for release June 2017. I provide editing services for writers and am currently applying final touches on a suspense thriller and a children's book.I spend my winters in Bucerias, Nayarit. If you want to talk writing or about life in general, contact me at cluculzwriter at yahoo dot ca. I'm always here.

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Joylene Butler’s protagonist, Professor Brendell Meshango, is a complex and uniquely Canadian character. She is a strong woman, but neither her Aboriginal childhood, her adult success as an academic, nor her fierce loyalty to her own child prepare her, or us, for the terror that strikes when she becomes the victim of a, seemingly random home invasion. The action in “Broken But Not Dead” is gripping; the characters are rich and the climax riveting.

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Dead Witness

Dead Witness, a novel

Valerie McCormick is a wife and mother from small town Canada. While visiting Seattle, she becomes the only witness to the brutal seaside murder of two FBI agents. When she flees to the nearest police station to report the crime, she becomes caught up in a web of international intrigue and danger. Suddenly, she and her family are in the sights of ruthless criminals bent on preventing her from testifying against the murderer. Even with FBI protection, Valerie is not safe. Whisked away from her family and all that is familiar to her, Valerie fights back against the well intentioned FBI to ultimately take control over her life with every ounce of fury a mother can possess.
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